Last Updated on September 24, 2022 by Bitfinsider

The five-day Cardano Vasil hard fork process, which the Cardano Foundation claims will improve network performance, begins today.

Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson described it as the most difficult update the developers have undertaken since the project’s inception in 2017.

A hard fork occurs when the code of a network fundamentally changes, necessitating the creation of a new and distinct version of a blockchain. They can be, but aren’t always, divisive.

For example, following the merge last week, the Ethereum network experienced a hard fork. It was an attempt to keep a proof-of-work version of Ethereum alive, which relies on miners to validate transactions.

The Vasil hard fork, on the other hand, will use Cardano’s hard fork combinator technology, which, according to Cardano developer Input Output on Twitter, introduces new features without losing any data from the previous version of the blockchain.

According to Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard, the main benefit of the Vasil hard fork will be faster transaction times.

“Through Plutus V2, Vasil will enhance Cardano’s smart contract capabilities, adding greater efficiency to an already powerful smart contract platform,” he said. “In the end, it will lower script execution costs and transaction size while increasing throughput.”

In other words, following the completion of the Vasil hard fork and an upgrade to the Plutus scripting language on September 27, it will be possible to write Cardano smart contracts with less code. Because more transactions can fit into each block (or batch of transactions) on the network, transaction fees can be reduced.